Symbolism in The Aspern Papers

¶ … Henry James is a plot that is replete with symbolism both in its overarching theme and in its subcomponents.

The Aspern Papers devolves around the plot of a man who would stoop at almost nothing to procure and publish the papers of Jeffery Aspern a famous poet. The character, this nameless narrator, goes to Venice to locate Juliana Bordereau, former lover of a famous, now dead, American poet. He erreoneously believes that Juliana has papers written by this poet and is prepared to court her niece Miss Tita, an unappealing and simple woman, in order to catch a glimpse of these 'Aspern papers'. Miss Tita agrees to help him. Juliana later offers to sell a miniature portrait of Aspern to the narrator for an exorbitant price, but shortly after catches the narrator rifling through her room searching for the alleged papers. Juliana calls the narrator a "publishing scoundrel," collapses, the narrator flees, and Juliana dies. When the narrator returns some days later, Miss Tina hints that he can have the papers if he marries her. Again, the narrator flees, but gradually changes his mind about the proposal and when he returns, Miss Tina tells him that she has burnt the letters one by one, and can never marry him. The plot concludes by the narrator receiving the miniature portrait of the poet for a small price.

The Aspern Papers was one of the last pieces of work that Henry James wrote. Himself fully acquainted with the ramifications of fame and the absurd degrees to which people pursued him in order to win some sort of trophy from someone who was perceived as a celebrity (Kaplan, 1992), the Aspern papers pokes fun at the degree to which people seek vestiges of someone called a 'celebrity' and satirizes the phenomenon of fame.

The narrator would commit himself to almost anything in order to possess those papers, even to marrying someone whom he despised, and the grasp of those papers drove him back time and again to ever irrational actions. At first he disguises himself as a lodger in order to look at the papers; then enters into a pretense to marry Miss Tina to the same objective. When he is urged to marry Miss Tina, he flees, but the thought of the papers makes him change his mind and actually commit himself to marrying her. At the end, after leaving for the third time, he buys the portrait of the poet but no longer for the exorbitant price that was initially offered him. By offering the "miniature" portrait to him at a highly reduced price, Miss Tina seems to be signifying that celebrity has been accorded bloated and absurd value. The narrator, himself, in fact concludes that the papers are 'scrap'.

The conclusion of the novel, in fact, sums up the symbolism of the whole The portrait that was initially accorded exorbitant value by Juliana -- the celebrity that the narrator himself (and that his society itself) prized so highly -- was, at the conclusion of the story, sold to him for a mere trifle. Fame, the author seems to be implying, is over-rated. People go to absurd extremes to possess fame and, failing that, to affiliate themselves with the possessor of fame. The phenomena, however, is overrated and frequently results in disillusionment.

Disillusionment strings through the tale. The girl about whom the poet, in the 1820s, wrote acclaimed love songs has become a macabre, senile, and plotting woman. Shielded from the light (and this, too, is symbolism in that celebrity itself is shielded from the light and occluded), Miss Juliana's eye-guard "created a presumption of some ghastly death-head lurking beneath it" (James, 139). Nonetheless, fame persisted in occluding banality and, at her presence: "my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for my benefit" (ibid.)

The narrator, so caught up in his drive for the papers was himself, as he admits, "so full of his literary concupiscence" (James, 152) that he had been unaware of all else (in this case, Tina's transformation). 'Literary concupiscence' was the overwhelming urge to posses the papers, so overwhelming that it became his obsession. Briefly removed from that obsession, the narrator momentarily glimpses Tina as something else. In fact, he himself describes how the preoccupation with "stratagems and spoils" (ibid.) had deflected him from seeing Miss Tina's supposed failure. Momentarily, he sees Tina as something else. This new perspective shifts and the burning of the papers causes him to see her once again as a plain, dingy old woman.

Celebrity, James seems to hint, is an illusion. It drives the pursuer into concupiscence. Symbolism can be seen, too, in characterization of the story as it typical with James: in its dialogue, style, and descriptions of persona, environment, atmosphere, mood, and so forth. The Aspern Papers is set in Venice where pretensions and social masquerades are common. Celebrity is a masquerade too, where the common individual takes on layers of glory and where fans no longer see the 'real man' but a presence who awes them by his alleged grandeur. Venice, too, is draped in the guise of romanticism and culture.